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Library and Information Services in Astronomy III
ASP Conference Series, Vol. 153, 1998
Editors: U. Grothkopf, H. Andernach, S. Stevens-Rayburn, and M. Gomez
Electronic Editor: H. E. Payne
Ann Okerson1
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
1©Ann
Okerson. Readers of
this article may copy it without the copyright owner's permission, if
the author and publisher are acknowledged in the copy and the copy is
used for educational, not-for-profit purposes.
Abstract:
The various electronic media transform the way in which authors create
their works and readers read and use them in their study, research and
publication. Those profound changes are mirrored by immense changes in
the back rooms of librarians and information specialists who now deal with
a radically different environment for decision-making and access choices.
This opening talk will review characteristics of the ``new'' marketplace,
including:
The immense growth of electronic resources of all sorts
The shift from national copyright law to individually negotiated
insti-
tutional license as the regime that governs use of electronic
resources
The move of publishers to sell information in ``aggregated'' bundles,
even though customers may not ask for this
The development of aggressive groups of libraries buying together
as
consortia and changing the marketplace
Most of the talk will be given to reviewing and expanding on the above
points. Floating gracefully requires being well informed, developing
new skills as collaborators and negotiators, and maintaining an
open, flexible approach to the way in which library work is managed.
Thank you for inviting me to the LISA III meeting. I am honoured to be
included in the meeting of a group of astronomy information professionals
and researchers whose energy and achievements are greatly admired in many
fields of endeavor. All of us have much for which to thank the ``new''
information technologies. Though they have been years in development, it
is in the 90s that we have truly begun to experience the first fruits of
their power to re-invent the way in which we go about our daily pursuits.
Our agility, flexibility, and our imaginations are being stretched in new
ways that - most days of the week - leave us breathless.
Even better is the fact that those of us who are in the information
business and have known for a long time how to do our own specific parts
of the job, now have significant opportunities to engage with others in
other parts of the same endeavor: journal editors, publishers,
developers, and distributors. A great deal of my own interaction with
electronic information suppliers, as many of you know, relates to the
pricing and licensing of electronic materials for institutional library
customers, through projects such as Yale's LIBLICENSE web site [1], the
LIBLICENSE-L internet discussion list [2], and licensing work both at Yale
and as Coordinator of NERL (NorthEast Research Libraries consortium) [3], a
group formed to jointly license and make available electronic resources
for our 17 research library members. During the course of this work, I
observe that much of our libraries' information business is vastly
different to what it was even 10 years ago and a lot of it could not have
been predicted even 5 years ago.
- 1.
- Sheer numbers of electronic resources. Thousands of information
providers have jumped into the scholarly marketplace with electronic
products of one sort or another: CDs, online databases, full text
resources, multi-media. Many learned societies, scientific publishers,
university presses, full-text publishers, vendor/aggregators, as well as
new entrants to the publishing arena, now offer versions of either
print-originating or completely electronic information. The numbers have
ballooned in a short 2 to 3 years with no signs of abating. For example,
NewJour [4], our online forum for announcing new e-journals, magazines and
newsletters reported 3600 titles in its Web archive as of April 5, 1997,
4500 as of October 5th, six months later, and about 5400 titles as of the
beginning of April 1998 - this without the 1100 science journal titles
that Elsevier is now making available in electronic form. Carol
Tenopir's ``The Data Dealers,'' Library Journal, May 15, 1997, describes a
universe of databases numbering in the tens of thousands.
The Yale University Library alone licenses over 400 electronic resources
of varying size, type, and price and reviews about two new electronic
content licenses a week. We offer direct access to over 1,000 scholarly
electronic journals and indirect access to many more; and we now estimate
that about 7-8% of our acquisitions budget goes to electronic information
sources, excluding our online catalogs.
- 2.
- Licensing has become the mode of defining the electronic
information deal. This is a very different way of working than was the
traditional acquisitions mode. In some part, this situation has come into
being because no consensus or national guidelines on electronic fair use
or fair dealing have been achieved. For example, the U.S. CONFU
(Conference on Fair Use) group
quickly began to come unstuck in reaching agreements on most of the dozen
or more areas defined as needing guidelines. Interestingly enough, with
the ball in the court of publishers, intermediaries, and librarians on
this matter, we are finding constructive ways of working. Instead of
waiting on Congress or other national bodies, a number of publishers and
libraries appear to be able to make their peace together, thoughtfully and
responsibly, one step at a time.
- 3.
- The rise of aggregators. The costly technological investments
that producers need to make to move their publications onto an electronic
base; the publishing processes that are being massively re-conceived and
reorganized; and not least, the compelling vision of digital libraries
that proffer information to the end user through a single or small number
of interfaces, with a single or modest number of search engines, gives
rise to information aggregators of many sorts. Few publishers convert or
create just one journal or book in an electronic format. From the
viewpoint of research libraries, it appears that the electronic
environment has the effect of shifting transaction emphasis from single
titles to collections or aggregations of electronic materials as
marketplace products.
- Publishers of multiple journal titles are making these available through
their own interfaces, as well as through non-exclusive arrangements with
other providers.
- Information bundlers, such as Lexis-Nexis, OCLC, DIALOG@CARL, UMI, IAC,
OVID, etc., offer large collections of materials to libraries under
license. Some of these are sizable take-it-or-leave-it groupings; others
allow libraries to choose subsets or groups of titles.
- Subscription agents are beginning to develop gateways to electronic
resources and to offer to manage libraries licensing needs.
- Consortia of libraries are becoming significant ``aggregators''
of library
customers and dollars for publishers and vendors.
- 4.
- Publisher consolidation. Another kind of aggregation needs to be
mentioned separately here: the aggregation that happens when publishers or
information conglomerates merge with or buy other publishers. We have
seen a great deal many such consolidations and buyouts over the last two
decades and have become particularly aware of them in the STM journal
arena. Is this good news for information consumers? I hope it comes as
no surprise for any publishers here present to hear me say that
librarians' experience and perception over the past years has been that
this kind of consolidation has not improved our lot. The cost
efficiencies of such mergers do not seem to have reduced institutional
prices or price increases at all and so we are pessimistic that they will
in the future.
- 5.
- Library consortia have aggressively entered the content
negotiating arena. While library consortia have existed for decades, and
one of their primary aims has been effective information sharing, in the
United States it is mostly in the last 2 to 3 years that a combination of
additional state funding (for state-wide consortia), library demands, and
producers' willingness to negotiate with multiple institutions have come
together to make the consortial license an efficient and - perhaps -
cost-effective way to manage access to large bodies of electronic content.
In sum, electronic information is a new game; the prices are higher.
Consolidating, aggregating, and all around scaling-up seem to be the name
of the game and one of libraries' best strategies is, I believe, to
organize ourselves, bargain well, and secure the best possible
arrangements.
- 1.
- Scaling up. Institutional electronic content licenses are now
generally regarded as negotiable, and successes of different sorts have
ensued (success being defined as a mutually agreeable contract), making
the parties feel that they can work together effectively in this new mode.
However, negotiations are labor-intensive. Negotiation requires time (to
test the resource as well as to develop the expertise and negotiate), and
time is a major cost here. The current mode of one on one negotiations
between libraries and their publishers seems at the moment necessary, for
many reasons, and at the same time it places new demands on publishers'
and libraries' staff.
-
The contract that codifies the license terms is a pervasive document
covering every aspect of the library/producer relationship, from
authorized uses and users to technology base, duration, security
mechanisms, price, liability, responsibility, etc. That is, the license
describes the full dimensions of the ``deal'' for any resource. Those
dimensions are broad and there is a great deal to work through, beyond the
matters of uses and users. Where placing an order for a book or reference
work is usually a straightforward act involving 2-3 people for short time,
completing a deal for an electronic product involves, these days, numerous
institutional players (public, selection, and technical staff, as well as
users).
- Clearly, it is too early to shift the burden onto intermediaries such as
subscription agencies or other vendors who have vested interests of their
own. So far their intervention has been absent or not particularly
successful. In fact, in some of the situations where intermediaries
purvey electronic databases, library customers secure less advantageous
use terms than those libraries could obtain by licensing directly from the
publishers.
- 2.
- Terms of use. Let's begin with the good news. This area has
caused some of the most anguished discussions between publishers and
libraries. Initially, many publishers' contact language for electronic
information was highly restrictive about both Permitted Users and
Permitted Uses. Assumptions and requirements about how use ought to be
contained were at times ludicrous, for example, in phrases such as ``no
copies may be made by any means electronic or mechanical.'' Through dialog
between librarians and producers, who are usually genuinely eager to
market their work to happy customers, much of this language has
disappeared from the contracts presented to library customers. The Yale
Library, for example, is now party to a number of licenses that permit
substantial copying and downloading for individual learning, research,
in-the-classroom teaching, library reserves, coursepacks, and related
activities. The licenses of 1998 represent significant all-around
improvements and surely reinforce the feeling that progress between
licensers and customers is being made. While we have tended to focus our
licensing worries on the areas of fair use and users rights, in fact I
think this has been something we manage well and the bigger challenges now
lie elsewhere.
- 3.
- Site license definition and complexity. Defining a user site is
no small thing; a site license can encompass anything from a single
workstation to an entire campus, to a campus with branch campuses in the
same or distant town - let alone distance learning programs who knows
where. Consortial licenses cover multiple sites. Consider another U.S.
scaling up example: As Americans adopt managed health care and merge
hospitals, a university site can include state-wide networks of teaching
hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices. We have already begun
discussions on how Yale New Haven Hospital and the Medical Library will
take on a central information provision role for the practitioners of
medicine throughout the state of Connecticut.
- 4.
- Price. Pricing models for electronic information are in their
infancy; they tend to be creative, complicated and often hard to
understand [5]. Consortial and multi-site pricing is particularly complex.
Each new model solves some of the equity or revenue problems associated
with earlier models but introduces confusions of its own. While pricing
of electronic resources is not strictly speaking a problem with the
license itself, price is a major obstacle in making electronic agreements.
At the same time, it is clear that libraries, particularly through their
consortial negotiators, expect bulk pricing arrangements, sliding scales,
early signing bonuses, and other financial inducements that publishers may
not necessarily feel they are able to offer.
One subset of the pricing difficulty is what I will call the
"revenue-maintenance" or ``non-cancel'' requirement of a number of
electronic journal publishers. For example: Yale is interested in
licensing the journals of XXX publisher. To do this, Yale is frequently
asked to agree to the following:
- (a)
- a multi-year license;
- (b)
- the print subscription price plus an increment for the e-version;
- (c)
- pricing based on this or last year's print subscriptions; and
- (d)
- a no-cancel clause for the duration of the license.
The latter item assures the publishers that even though the institution
may in fact cancel (or perhaps substitute titles), the payment to the
publisher remains undiminished. While this can be an effective startup
strategy, it is a mode that libraries cannot continue for very long - for
obvious reasons - and my librarians both within Yale and in our NERL
consortium have signaled that they will no longer agree to expenditures of
their subject funds under these terms.
- 5.
- Bundling/packaging/aggregating. The electronic collections
offered to the research library marketplace frequently include titles
librarians would not have chosen for their institutions, had these
resources been unbundled. This has been an issue in several of Yale
Library's negotiations. Say that the publisher of a large number of
quality journals or a significant aggregator of databases makes only the
full collection available in e-form. By this means, from two different
suppliers, the Yale Library recently ``added'' 50 electronic journal titles
and a hundred databases to its cohort, titles it had chosen to NOT
purchase in print. I am skeptical that librarians will be willing to
continue to support materials they do not want or need for their clients.
An interesting tension shows itself here: on the one hand, publishers and
producers achieve economies of scale in producing and selling multiple
electronic products together and presumably can pass these savings on to
libraries; on the other, libraries don't benefit from an economy of scale
that gives us resources beyond any that we or our users want.
- 6.
- Liability and trust. One of the most vexing issues for producers
and their licensees has been the producer's assumption that institutions
can and ought to vouch for the behavior of individual users (in licenses
the sections that deal with this matter are usually called Authorized or
Permitted Users and what Users may do under the terms of a license is
called an Authorized or Permitted Use) and that individual users' abuses
of the terms of a license can, in fact, kill the deal for a library or a
whole group of libraries. Working through this matter with provider after
provider in a partnership/cooperative approach poses many challenges. In
fact, this matter may be a microcosm of a larger issue: the development
of the kind of trust that must underlie any electronic content license.
- 7.
- The special challenges of consortia. Ideally, groups of libraries
can negotiate favorable usage terms and prices with producers. Publishers
in turn can save substantial legal and marketing costs by dealing with
groups of libraries. In practice, both licensers and licensees still have
much to learn about how to operate in this scaled up environment. Some of
the particularly vexing issues, for example, include:
- Not all producers desire to negotiate with consortia; some are not able
to negotiate with consortia at all.
- In the early days of making a consortial agreement, the libraries may
not achieve any efficiencies because all of them (and their institutional
counsel) may feel the need or desire to participate in the negotiating
process. Thus, in fact, a license for 12 institutions may take nearly as
long to negotiate as 12 separate licenses.
- As one who at times attempts to bring 17 large libraries into consortial
deals, I observe that this form of cooperation comes no more easily to
libraries than does cooperative collection development in print form. It
is not easy to get a consortium, which is after all composed of individual
libraries, to agree to a single license, at least in early days.
- Consortia overlap greatly, particularly with existing bodies such as
cataloging and lending ``utilities'' offering consortial deals to their
members. It seems that every library is in several consortia these days,
and many of us are experiencing a ``competition'' for our business from
several different consortia at once for a single product's license. The
matter of "consortial muddle" badly cries to be sorted out.
- No one is sure precisely what a consortial ``good deal'' comprises. That
is, it is hard to define and measure success. The bases for comparison
between individual institutional and multiple institutional prices are
thin and the stated savings can often feel like a sales pitch.
- Small institutions are more likely to be unaffiliated with large or
powerful institutions and left out of seemingly "good deals" secured by
the larger, more prosperous libraries or consortia. Small special
libraries in well defined fields such as astronomy can have a hard time
getting a good deal in the new electronic information marketplace.
- In fact, treating individual libraries differently to collectives may,
in the long run, not be in the interests of publishers let alone the
smaller libraries.
- 8.
- Save the best for last: Interlibrary loan (ILL) and resource
sharing. It
should come as no surprise to you that, at least in the United States, the
matter of Interlibrary Loan or Resource-Sharing is the most vexing of all
in full-text licenses. Many hours have been given over to this topic,
both at the national level and in numerous specific negotiations
throughout the country. Very rarely is any such use permitted by
publishers or vendors, though there are a handful of exceptions. Every
publisher knows he is right to NOT open the thin end of the wedge to
uncompensated uses; every librarian knows that there should be some leeway
in a license to allow shipment of e-materials to users or libraries who
are not able to gain or afford access. The concept of fair use and the
underlying purpose of copyright law (to balance rights of
creators/readers) support librarians in our stand, we are sure. Last
summer, a straw poll on the Liblicense-l list [6] showed just how adamant
librarians are about this point of principle - as adamant as publishers
are in their public position papers![7] What are we to do with this bone
of contention?
My suggestion here is that our only productive course of
action is to develop together some experiments that test the conditions
under which such delivery would in fact be workable and acceptable to both
parties. I suspect such an experiment between willing buyers and sellers
could be designed and we could learn much from it. As I say this, there
seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The Astrophysical Journal
(American Astronomical Society, with the University of Chicago Press as
its Publisher), has permitted ILL as part of its electronic license since
the e-version became available. Recently, the American Chemical Society
announced (February 1998) that it would permit ILL within similar
boundaries. It is now not inconceivable, given this leadership, that
other publishers will soon follow suit.
Before I conclude, a few observations that put some context around the
kind of discussion we are engaging with here in Puerto de la Cruz:
It is easy in the exciting digital information environment to become
carried away with the thrill of the marketplace chase - for it is
thrilling indeed - and lose sight of how this all fits with our larger
research and academic library missions. I have found a touchstone for
myself in recent months in the most exotic book-buying trip I have yet
taken for Yale: not quite Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but there
were close moments.
In August 1996, at a time when we were without a Southeast Asia curator
for our important collection in this area, I made a trip to restore and
sustain some working links with publishers and distributors there. One
stage of the trip led me to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. At that moment,
Cambodia was living through a privileged interlude of quiet and relative
prosperity, since shaken by coup and civil unrest (though our contacts
there say that matters are less dire than the western press portrays
them). My specific purpose there was to establish a link with a local
source of supply for the thin trickle of materials published in Phnom
Penh: mainly newspapers, reports, and books by NGOs - the international
non-governmental agencies and organizations that seek to support the
development of the country.
I will not give you my travelogue (the slides are on the web)[8]. My
point today is to report some lessons learned.
- 1.
- Electronic information matters, but of course so do books, newspapers,
journals - and in every case they ``matter'' by their relevance to our
institutions' fundamental missions and programs. For example, Yale has a
strong southeast Asia program, at the moment one of our leading lights
being Ben Kiernan, prominent and controversial scholar of recent Cambodian
history and head of the Yale program that is documenting the terrible
genocide of the Cambodian 1970s [9]. For Ben and his students, the print
materials I searched for, even though few in number, are of immense value.
There is no electronic product or text that can currently replace them and
there may not be for decades.
- 2.
- At the same time, the power of electronic resources to extend the
range of our mission is potentially enormous. While in Cambodia, I was
guided by two remarkable women: Margaret Bywater, an Australian librarian
funded by the Asia Foundation, and Sister Luise Ahrens, a Maryknoll nun.
As these people struggle to help the people of Cambodia rebuild their
University, they live at the moment with only the most tenuous of e-mail
links to the outside world. It was only last summer that Cambodia gained
its own Internet service provider - and who knows who reliable that
service is or will be for some years to come. I could not help thinking,
as I looked through the then one large room that held all the books the
University owns - an old edition of a western encyclopedia, some science
textbooks from Australian universities, and oddments better suited to an
attic than a library - I could not help think that with only the
umbilical cord of a network connection and some hardware, there were
already resources potentially available to this struggling institution far
more abundant than anything they can ever hope to buy in the traditional
way.
I believe and hope that one of the real blessings of the Internet for
learning and teaching worldwide will be in the way it allows us to build
new partnerships and ways of sharing that let us extend the reach of the
international learned community to more people in more places than has
ever been possible before.
We cannot and will not do that unless we maintain our own sense of our
mission and expand our vision about the way information comes to us and is
used. For the moment, the challenges I have described in this talk - the
details of license contracts, the impasse over interlibrary loan - may
seem obsessively minute in many ways. But they do represent the larger
issue very clearly: will the scholarly and academic communities retain
some control over their scholarship? Will we grow into smarter business
thinkers about the way we manage our information relationships? or Will
the power of technology leave us in a pure market situation, buying
information-by-the-drink, and unable to build the collaborations we so
much desire? Information professionals' work and efforts in the
electronic information area are guided by a larger passionate commitment
to the values our institutions embody for society and to the importance of
securing and advancing the leadership of our learned communities in the
decades to come.
References and URLs
[1] http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense
[2] Liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu. For access to the archives or to
subscribe to the list, see the headers at the LIBLICENSE web site in
[1].
[3] http://www.library.yale.edu/NERLpublic
[4] http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/
[5] A LIBLICENSE-L message of February 12, 1997, enumerated a dozen
different pricing models for electronic
[6] http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/straw.html
[7] See the following papers: ``IPCC Position Statement
on Libraries,
Copyright and the Electronic Environment,'' and ``The Use of Digitised
Copyright Works in Libraries; a statement on behalf of electronic,
book and journal publishers by the Federation of European Publishers,''
November 1996.
[8] http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/cambodia.html
[9] Cambodian Genocide Documentation Program,
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/
© Copyright 1998 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, California 94112, USA
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